How Attorneys Can Use Slack For Legal Research

Slack, the fastest-growing communications app, is gaining traction amongst modern legal offices. Part of the appeal is that, much like everyone’s favorite practice management system, Slack integrates with a virtual smorgasbord of existing web apps and services, allowing for the automation of normally laborious tasks (like legal research). With RSS feeds and the growing integration of web services, research can be instant and automatic for lawyers. Which is a good thing, as most clients hate paying for legal research. They expect lawyers to instantly know the answer to their question, not appreciating how the law can change in subtle ways as precedent develops.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to set up an RSS feed that monitors important precedent for new citations. When it finds one, it creates the opportunity to discuss it with other colleagues in a special Slack room.

Step 1: Generate a case citator RSS feed

For the purposes of this post, we used CanLII, due to their ability to export search results to RSS, but any search engine with RSS output can be used. (It is important to sort the search results to put the most recent first.)

This is interesting but I’m trying to visualize a way to incorporate this feature into my law practice. I use Westlaw for research (no RSS) but Google Alerts for other things where I need daily updates. Maybe it could be used for things I would use a Google Alert on. I am going to play around with it. Thanks for the info!

A_Sa

I’m fascinated by this idea, but I haven’t found that Lexis or Fastcase are RSS enabled for searches. Am I missing the option? Which legal search engines have RSS capability for search results?